How can I be delivered from the world’s wisdom into a fuller life? In his homily in today’s Office of Readings, Pope St. Gregory laments, “With my mind divided and torn to pieces by so many problems, how can I meditate or preach wholeheartedly?” I empathize with Gregory, who fears that his worldly responsibilities distract him from his true work: his deep love of Christ. Or, like Simon Peter, I too have “worked hard all night and caught nothing.”
It is some comfort that the frantic futility of our world is not the result of modernity or technology, our parents, or our inability to say no. We are created, so we are finite; we are
ashamed, so we fear being caught failing. We live in a world structured by pride, which judges our worth by our results. We have come to expect, and to deliver, judgment without
mercy. Putting failure off for another day often feels like as much as we can do.
Yet Jesus Christ does not simply comfort us by coming among us. He transforms the human condition, making our weakness a source of strength and our stubborn love the truest wisdom. “Put out into deep water,” he says, and it is nonsense advice, a simple rejection of the empirical evidence of failure. “Try again,” Jesus says to Peter, just as he will say it after Peter denies him. And Peter loves him, so he begins again, finding a feast where before there was famine.
Let us love and begin anew.
